If you’d put £10,000 into Rolls-Royce stocks in September 2020, you’d now be staring at £152,853: a 1,429% return, outpacing even Nvidia. It’s no wonder that the stock has inspired cult-like devotion from the most online of its investors. A …
Fortunes are changing in the culture war
Wheels of justice grind slow but grind big fine, as Sun Tzu once almost said. The Office for Students has now completed its three-and-a-half year investigation into free speech violations at Sussex University, hitting my former employer with a record …
Britain’s defence delusions
As anyone who has renovated a run-down house will attest, the very first, unglamorous tasks are to ensure that the structure is stable and weatherproof, and above all that the work ahead is affordable in the first place. Many are …
What Callaghan can teach Labour
James Callaghan is one of those prime ministers — like Gordon Brown or Rishi Sunak — who seems like a political footnote. That’s a bit unfair, though. True, his premiership only lasted three years, and ended when he led Labour …
Ketamine is numbing Gen Z’s pain
“If someone were to design the perfect drug for a teenager who is depressed and doesn’t have much money, this would be it…”
Ketamine is one of the more interesting drugs out there. It can make you feel relaxed, wobbly, …
Male repression is good, actually
A couple of years ago, out running on a rural track some distance from houses or paved road, I met a group of twentysomething men running the other way. As we passed, nothing happened beyond the usual countryside exchange of …
Manchester City could cripple football
Over the past 15 years, by far the most successful team in English football has been Manchester City. Since being bought Sheikh Mansour, the son of the Emir of Abu Dhabi, in 2008, they have been transformed from a club …
Great Yarmouth is stuck in the past
The bookies standing trackside give me a look, the novice punter, a fiver in my hand. The tall one, grey-haired, speaks up. “I’ll give you a good price on that one,” he says. “Two-to-one.” I put my money on Loverly …
How lockdown created Starmerism
Naff; garish; tedious; mandatory; much hyped at the time; discrediting to many; ending with a large damages bill and a collective pact of forgetting — lockdown was an office Christmas party on a national scale. Five years on, almost nothing …
Will Thomas Tuchel answer England’s prayers?
Tonight, England face Albania in their first game under Thomas Tuchel, the first foreigner to take charge of the national side since 2010. That was the summer in which Fabio Capello, an Italian, oversaw a miserable World Cup campaign. After …
The innocence of Adolescence
“Do you know where your children are?” used to be the most chilling thing you could say to a parent. Now, of course, parents know exactly where their children are: at home, probably in their bedrooms. As playing out has …
What Bismarck taught Dominic Cummings
Otto von Bismarck preoccupies Dominic Cummings. If you spend any time reading his blog, you will have noted the 1890 Punch cartoon Dropping the Pilot. The Pilot in question is a thick-necked walrus, Bismarck, descending from the Prussian ship of …
Beware the lockdown generation
Here and there you can still see evidence of the collective madness of the Covid era. Some “social distancing” markers still linger on pavements or shop floors. Occasionally I find a face mask in a coat or handbag I haven’t …
Reform won’t save Britain
Labour isn’t working — and things will only get worse. As if chaining itself to neoliberalism isn’t bad enough, the Government is now tying itself in knots over rearmament, ironically the very issue that did for Clement Attlee. Good luck …
The danger of Starmer’s conservatism
The challenge of political leadership, Henry Kissinger observed, is that all the easy decisions have been taken by someone else, leaving only the most difficult and agonising choices for those at the very top. The most difficult issues of all, …
